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Iversen’s Multiconfused Log (see p.1!) | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6700 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes  Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 3817 of 3959 05 February 2015 at 10:13am | IP Logged |
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Yesterday I made a couple of new bilingual text collections:
One with the Greek Wikipedia article about the Sumerians plus the one about their language (both with a French translation) and a long article from loveforzionblogspot.dk (!) about the Semitic languages in general with a Danish translation. But I could just as well have used translations into more exotic languages because the Greek texts are almost completely transparent. The other in Romanian with a couple of texts from muzee-dambovitene.ro, including a fairly long one about Vlad the Impaler (with a translation in Esperanto) and a couple of descriptions of individual musea from the same page (with Danish translations), followed by more museum descriptions from Timisoara and descriptions of the zoo in the same town plus its partner in Szeged in Hungary. And just for fun I have used machine translations into Catalan, Greek and Portuguese instead of the usual translations into Danish or English. But I have also printed an article called "Relative Constructions in European Languages: A Look at Non-Standard" because I want to see how far the definition of relative clauses can be extended, and I have read some things about types of generative versus constituent grammars - Berlin is already beginning to influence my reading habits. DA: ... og så faldt det mig ind at vi har nogle sjove konstruktioner på dansk (men ikke i det såkaldt soignerede sprog, så jeg anbefaler ikke at lære dem til aktiv brug) Vi bruger normalt "der" som subjekt, "som" som subjekt og direkte eller indirekte objekt, "hvem" og "hvilken/hvilket/hvilke" som regimen efter præposition (som kan også bruges, men kun hvis præpositionen ikke står lige foran), "hvad" som neutralt subjekt i parentetiske relativsætninger, "hvis" som possesiv med adjektivisk funktion, "hvor" med lokativisk værdi samt "da" med temporel værdi. Og vi kan også droppe relativpronominet, dog ikke hvis det ellers skulle have stået som subjekt. Det vil sige at konstruktioner som de følgende er helt efter bogen: manden der kom manden som kom manden som jeg så manden som jeg gav en gave manden som jeg gav en gave til manden jeg så manden jeg gav en gave manden jeg gav en gave til manden til hvem jeg gav en gave manden til hvilken jeg gav en gave manden hvis hus jeg reparerede manden hvis kone jeg gav en gave huset hvor jeg gav manden en gave dagen hvor jeg gav manden en gave dagen da jeg gav manden en gave I den nævnte artikel citeres følgende danske eksempel (med en enkelt stavefejl - samt en stjerne der markerer at konstruktionen ikke anses for korrekt): *Kender du den mand som der talte med hende? know you that man RPAR SRE spoke with her? ‘Do you know the man who talked to her?’ Hvis man kan finde sig i puristernes unådige blikke, kan man endda også sige *Kender du den mand som at der talte med hende? *Kender du den mand som at talte med hende? *Kender du manden at talte med hende? Ingen af disse anses naturligvis for korrekte. I det første eksempel er "der" muligvis i virkeligheden et dummy-subjekt af den type der indleder konstruktioner af typen "der var en mand der talte med hende" - det er ikke noget der kan bevises, men mest et spørgsmål om fornemmelse. Men et fingerpeg i den retning kunne være, at man ikke kan sige "**Kender du den mand der som talte med hende" - end ikke i sjusket sprog. I konstruktionerne med "at" er det vanskeligt at se nogen logisk begrundelse for brugen af den mest meningstomme konjunktion vi har. Det mest oplagte er at se en indflydelse fra de mange konstruktioner med "at": "før at..", "så snart at", "fordi at", "ideen at" osv. osv. A propos "fordi" at: denne konstruktion har eksisteret siden vikingetiden, og en lignende konstruktion bruges stadig på islandsk ("af því að"), men har været hadet af puristiske sproglærere næsten lige så længe. Det behøver man imidlertid ikke bekymre sig om - det er kun hyperkorrekte pernittengrynere der IKKE bruger den. Og så er der naturligvis sætningsknuderne, som læsere med en god hukommelse måske kan huske at de har set beskrevet i denne log. <-- Dette var faktisk en sætningsknude. Prøv at overveje hvorfor. Edited by Iversen on 10 February 2015 at 10:26am 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6700 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 3818 of 3959 07 February 2015 at 3:02pm | IP Logged |
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I have wasted a couple of hours on reading about homepages. At least I now know what I want and I have a plan for such a thing - plans that include not only 'da book', but also some multilingual travelogues, a more suitable setting for my paintings and maybe even for some scans of sheet music. But I would prefer keeping it in pure html, and this goes against the trend which is to store everything in totally opaque and complicated cms-systems. So.. absolutely nothing decisive has happened so far, it has all been searching and running my head against walls.
And then I started out making an umbrella thread for TAC, but discovered that Josquin already had done all the hard work. No umbrella for 2015. GER: Gerade jetzt sitze ich am PC und beobachte ein TV-Programm von Island, wo die Mitarbeiter von Arte eine deutschsprachige Frau von Vestmannaeyjarnar gefunden haben, die sein Haus verloren hat, als der Vulkan Surtsey plötzlich im Jahr 1963 entstand und die ganze Siedlung in schwarzer Lava begrabte. EDIT: Aber kurz danach mußte ich wieder dieses Programm verlassen wegen eines infernalischen singenden Geräuschquelle weibliches Geschlechtes im Hintergrund. Stattdessen hörte ich ich dann Klaviermusik. Nicht alle Geräuschquellen sind gleichermaßen scheußlich. SP: He llegado al final de mi campaña de palabras españolas que se inició con la letra L. Seriá más gratificante estudiar palabras de A a K en otro idioma. Ésta omisión está permisible cuando uno no tiene que aprender un vocabulario a partir de cero. Edited by Iversen on 09 February 2015 at 4:50pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6700 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 3819 of 3959 09 February 2015 at 11:46pm | IP Logged |
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SP: DE hecho NO havia llegado al final de mi campaña de palabras españolas que se inició con la letra L. Havia olvidado en el momento de triumfo la necesidad de hacer repeticiónes, y hoy he hecho repeticiones para acerca de 250 palabras, y hay acerca de 50 mas para mañana. Pero me gusta hacer listas de palabras.
RO: Pe limba română am din nou citit ceva despre Vlad Țepeș - trebuie să fie cel mai popular tema în limba română. Acest text l-am găsit pe site-ul www.muzee-dambovitene.ro. A explicat, printre altele, originea poreclei "Dracula": regele maghiar Sigismund de Luxemburg (!) a fondat ordin Dracului pentru regelor creștini care aveau Imperiul Otoman ca dușman comun. Vlad al II-lea (tatal domnului Țepeș) a fost un membru foarte nerabdare al acestui ordin, și utilizat al lui drac peste tot: pe haine, monede, clădiri.. Vlad III Țepeș a fost doar fiul dracului. Și a avut ghinionul de a trăi în timp ce un alt rege maghiar, Matei Corvin, care nu a vrut în nici un fel să-și ispitească pe turci, așa că a răpit Vlad și l-a păstreazat timp de 12 ani - până când a fost forțat să facă ceva împotriva amenințării turc, și pentru asta a putut să folosesc pe Vlad. Dar unii boieri trădători au avut grijă să face ca capul Vladului deodată nu să fie găsit în același loc ca și restul de el. A fost nevoie de doar câteva luni pentru asta. Săracul de Vlad! Dar, de asemenea, sărăci de cei 30.000 de sași care au fost trașit în țeapă pe dealul de deasupra orașului Brașov, pentru că Vlad - probabil pe bună dreptate - nu încredea în loialitatea lor.. GR: Επιπλέον, έχω διαβάσει ένα κείμενο από m.lifo.gr , γραμμένο από έναν μαθητής λυκείου με πολύ λίγη εμπιστοσύνη στο μέλλον και κάπως σαρκαστική σύγκριση με το Υπουργός Παιδείας, ο πολύ αγαπητός Μπαμπινιώτης. Σε κάθε περίπτωση, πιστεύω ότι είναι ο Έλληνας Υπουργός Παιδείας, αλλά υπάρχει μια σκοτεινή δίοδο στην οποία ο φοιτητής αναμένει ότι έπρεπε να φύγει Μπρατισλάβα (?!) μέσα σε τρία χρόνια "για ιατρική". Αλλά ο υπουργός παιδείας σλοβάκος πιθανώς δεν ονομάζεται Μπαμπινιώτης. As you may have guessed I have been reading Romanian and Greek. First an article about Vlad the Impaler, who had a hard life - fighting against the Turcs, but being betrayed by the Saxons in Transylvania, some of his own noblemen and (not least) by the Hungarian king Mathias Corvin, who desperately tried not to 'rock the boat' and therefore kept Vlad locked away for 12 years. When he finally decided to do something and released Vlad, some local noblemen took the opportunity to separate Vlad's head from the rest of him and send it to Istanbul to please the sultan. Poor Vlad! And poor those 30.000 Germans on a hill outside Brasov who got a stake up their bum because Vlad didn't trust them. Though maybe we shouldn't trust that there were 30.000 inhabitants in Brasov to impale. The Greek text was a letter from a pupil in a high school/grammar school who didn't really expect anything good from the future. One of his problems was that a new set rules apparently will let the notes from high/grammar school spill over into the university, so if he got an incomprehensible text for his upcoming exam in literature (or a question in religion which only the metropolit in Athens could answer) then he would be toast forever - not only for that particular exam. And he blamed the much beloved Greek education minister Bambiniotis for hatching that giant 'potato' of an idea. He finishes his sombre epistle by admitting that the situation might not become as bad as he had feared.... IT COULD VERY WELL BECOME FAR WORSE!!!!!!! Poor him, and poor Greece.. Edited by Iversen on 10 February 2015 at 10:29am 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6700 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 3820 of 3959 12 February 2015 at 3:50pm | IP Logged |
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A couple of days ago my TV box lost the will to live, so I have been limited to general public service programs from DR (Denmark), Norway, Sweden and Germany. And that's a problem. Two days ago there was a very interesting program about wolves at NRK (Norsk Rikskringkasting - 'Norwegian around-throwing'), but otherwise there hasn't been much of interest to watch . All my cable programs are coded for the time being. I do expect to return to normality in a few days when the new box arrives, but until then I am severely input challenged.
Apart from that I didn't study much yesterday evening. I have been scanning some of my old musical scores, but I found out that I didn't really like the instrumentation of my Cello concerto opus 1 so yesterday I sketched a new orchestration of the 1. movement and abbreviated its ending now I was at it. Given that I haven't composed anything since the 90s apart from a short toccata in 2002 it was quite surprising how easy it was to return to such a withered old hobby. The hardest thing was actually to get my fountain pen into working order again - but ballpoint pens are no good for writing note heads. In the bus back from home I finished the Spanish magazine about extinct civilisations, including several cultures I hadn't even heard about before - like the Xiongnú of Mongolia (maybe a forerunner of the Huns), Tuwana of Turkey (a part of the Hittite empire), Yam in Egypt (a lost oasis some 700 km from Abu Simbel) and Vetonia from central Spain (active around the time where Tartessos blossomed in Southern Spain, but more primitive than its more famous competitor). Edited by Iversen on 12 February 2015 at 4:01pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6700 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 3821 of 3959 16 February 2015 at 11:20am | IP Logged |
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I think it is lucky that I don't have composing as a regular hobby right now - it takes far too much time, and you can't listen to music while you are scribbling away on your own projects. It also influences your TV watching because of the background music - though these days my TV watching has been limited anyway because of my defunct cable box. So actually I have spent more time on writing notes than on language learning this weekend. But I did manage to do a few things, like describing my plight with that damned box in Indonesian, which brought me to the limit of my trusty Tuttle dictionary. So realizing that I have a weak point concerning technology in Indonesian I have made a printout of the Wikipedia article about cable TV, which I'll study closely in the near future.
IND: Saya menggunakan TV kabel karena sebagian besar saluran dokumenter dan saluran TV umum internasional hanya dapat dilihat melalui TV kabel di mana aku tinggal saya. Dan aku butuh kotak kabel karena tivi saya tidak mengenali saluran saya 'ekstra', hanya paket standar. Kotak terjemak ke mode 'boot' abadi selasa pagi. Saya menghubungi dengan layanan dukungan penyedia kabel saya, yang mengambil beberapa hari, tapi tidak memberikan jawaban. Saya sekarang memiliki kotak baru menunggu saya di kantor pos, dan kemudian dunia akan kembali ke keadaan normal. DA: Og så lige en smøre på dansk, fordi det vedrører min egen fortid. Lad mig først nævne at jeg som teenager var lige så tosset med at skrive musik som jeg idag er med at lære sprog. Men jeg holdt op i midten af 70erne fordi jeg havde skrevet mere end 500 opusser, men der var ikke nogen til at spille dem. Det var klart at det var en blindgyde. Så holdt jeg pause til midten af 80erne, hvor jeg startede forfra med opus 1. De første opusser var baseret på de mindst ringe af mine 'gamle' opusnumre, men andelen af nyskrevet materiale steg efterhånden. Jeg fandt endda nogle folk (mest fløjtespillere), der var interesserede i at spille noget af det. Men i 90erne spillede jeg efterhånden kun sammen med folk, der ikke var interesseret i nyskrevne ting, og så holdt jeg igen op med at komponere (ca. ved opus 72). Jeg skrev et enkelt kort stykke i 2002, men holdt så pause igen til i år, hvor jeg begyndte at scanne mine gamle værker ind og opdagede at i alt fald opus 1, en cellokoncert, var noget juks - men med potentiale for at blive repareret. Og det gør jeg så nu. Med mindre der er mere juks senere i serien, bliver det imidlertid et enligtstående eksempel. Komposition er for tidskrævende, og det er helt generelt dumt at have en hobby, hvor man er afhængig af andre (og helst skal være død for mange år siden for at de tager én alvorligt). IT: La mia occupazione colla composizione di musica classica è in realtà responsabile per miei primi tentativi di imparare l'italiano - volevo semplicemente sapere il significato delle parole negli partiture musicali che studiavo. Ho trovato un libro di testo scritto di una coppia danese, i Kirchheiner, e come poi trovei un libro per il spagnuolo scritto della stessa coppia ho comminciato imparare anche questa lingua. E in parallello ho imparato una mucchia di parole latine per poter comprendere i nomi scientifichi della fauna (la fauna di oggi e del tempo passato), la quale mi interessava assai durante questa epoca. Infatti ho composto una lista di tutte le specie di uccelli, mammiferi, rettili e anfibi che potessi trovare. Ho tuttavia rinunciato al progietto quando raggiunsi le pesce con le loro oltre 20.000 specie ufficiali. Edited by Iversen on 16 February 2015 at 1:12pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6700 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 3822 of 3959 18 February 2015 at 3:13am | IP Logged |
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I had to go to a neighbouring town (Viborg) today, and I spent some of the time in the train reading the first couple of chapters in Chomskys Syntactic Structures fra 1957. Now almost 60 years later it is easy to see why it became so influental because it is well written and persuasive, but it is also clear why it basically disrupted the development of the whole game of academic clinguistics in such a way that it became irrelevant for language learners. The devil lies in the details, like the refusal to accept a direct connection between meaning and syntax, the tendency to operate solely with binary nodes (like the infamous "NP VP", which probably came from constituent structure grammar) and the belief that any native speaker of a language can divide sentences into grammatical and non grammatical on behalf of his/her fellow speakers.
In all fairness it should be said that Chomsky himself has crept ever so slightly away from some of his more audacious early claims, and some of his ideas are definitely worth considering - like the use of transformations working on tree structures. But I personally would have preferred a dependency grammar at the base and then just transformations to describe (and explain) the more complicated structures, which can't be blamed on the structure of simple verbal and nominal paradigms. I have spent the evening on organizing my photos of paintings and my scans of opus 1-6 in a structure that could form the basis for a rudimentary homepage. I know there are ingenious homesite building software available, but I don't want the fancy stuff if it means that I can't upload the whole system in one go. I don't want a blog, because then it will be like a diary. I want something like a cupboard full of things. And I have recently developed a deep distrust of Yousee's TV boxes - I have received a new one, and it did everything it should for one evening. Then today it began the exact same boot-and-load show which I also saw with my old box. And it does so even when the TV is turned off. Right now I suspect that my cable operator oploads faulty code to the boxes, and that kills them off. Otherwise a totally new box wouldn't behave exactly like the old one. The result of all this trouble is that I didn't have time to study languages since I got home today. Edited by Iversen on 18 February 2015 at 3:43am 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6700 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 3823 of 3959 20 February 2015 at 11:07am | IP Logged |
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ESP: Mi nun min subskribintis por la universala mondo konferenco en Lillo, Francio, kaj mi ankaŭ mendis hoteloapartamenton, do mi alvenas al vivi kial grafoj kaj baronoj (laŭvorte Dana esprimo - "leve som grever og baroner"). Ekzistas muzeoj kaj zoo en Lillo mem, granda akvario en Bulonjo-sur-maro kaj aliaj vidindaj en la areo. Krome, Flandrio estas ĝuste apude, tiel mi povas fakte refreŝigi tutajn tri lingvojn dum la semajno de la eventa daŭro.
EN: ... and I'll try also to get to NY for the polyglot conference there. So this may be the first year since the 80s where I won't visit any NEW country. Luckily I'm already far above 100 countries, so my travel club won't throw me out for such a ephemeral lack of enthousiasm. Counted in days my travel activity this year will be quite normal, but three conferences in one year takes its toll. And right now I'm speculating about the exact syntactic formulation that can justify my singular in the last sentences ("takes"), but I'm sure it's correct. Edited by Iversen on 20 February 2015 at 11:13am 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6700 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 3824 of 3959 23 February 2015 at 12:12pm | IP Logged |
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I have finished Chomsky's Syntactic Structures and reached a few conclusions. He dispenses fairly quickly with grammars based on Markov chains, acknowledges that immediate constituent grammars might work until a certain point, but beyond that they would become unwieldy and uninformative, so to compensate for that he adds transformations - but retains the immediate constituent trees as the fundament on which to build his new utopical generative grammar. But this means that he retains features like the (in)famous S --> NP + VP, the binary splits, the idea that the phonematic rewriting takes place late in the process and first and foremost, the intention to keep semantics as far away from the sacred halls of grammar as possible. And in spite of later concessions this has led to a situation, where the linguists use a system which is unfit for use by language learners, and a system which looks like it was conceived for use by machines, but which entirely has been pushed aside by a system based on statistics.
Good oldfashioned European-style grammar was based on grammatical notions like subject, verbal, objects and several kinds of predicatives and these slots or roles could be filled out with words which belong to word classes partly defined by their morphology, partly by their ability to pop up in the aforementioned slots or roles. Word order would be maintained by referring to field models and fuzzy semantic considerations (like the wish to focus on certain elements). This looks more like dependency grammars than constituent grammars. In such grammars the roles or slots or valencies or whatever you call them are already seen as filled-out by concrete words, and the specific words have specific construction possibilities, but statistically these come as standardized patterns - though with unruly border egions, where the exceptions congregate. The concrete result of this is that the meaning already is there from the beginning because it enters with the concrete words - but this should not lead to abandoning the search for clear formal patterns. I share Chomsky's deep scepticism concerning explanations of the type "the subject is the doer", but in practice language is used for its aility to convey meaning, and even though meaning can be hard to standardize it is absurd to pretend that it only occurs after a lot of abstract operations have been carried through. So my hunch is that a dependency grammar with a simplified set of transformations comes closer to the actual functioning of language, and the attempts to write grammars as though they were to be used by machines were a blind alley. Even the machines weren't able to follow the thought through, and it remains to write just one complete grammar of any language using the methods sketched out in Chomsky's programmatic opus. Edited by Iversen on 24 February 2015 at 5:43pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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